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How much Elba security is enough?

Savannah Morning News

A private pleasure craft that anchored overnight in this slip used by LNG tanker ships to unload liquid natural gas at Elba Island caused the delay of a shipment, as the tanker ship Arctic Discoverer was held offshore until officials were certain there was no threat.

Scott Bryant

The orange-domed LNG ship Arctic Discoverer remains in berth on Elba Island Monday after being delayed more than 24 hours for a security sweep.

Scott Bryant

The orange-domed LNG ship Arctic Discoverer remains in berth at Elba Island Monday after being delayed more than 24 hours for a security sweep.

A pleasure craft's nighttime stopover at Elba Island this past weekend has the Coast Guard and maritime community wondering just how much security is enough for the already controversial liquefied natural gas facility.

Sometime around 1 a.m. Saturday, a sailboat cruised into one of the interior slips designed to accommodate the huge LNG tankers as they dispense more than 100,000 cubic meters of their liquefied product into Elba's massive storage tanks.

The sailboat dropped anchor in the slip for the night, leaving sometime before 7 a.m.

"I understand the boat posed a bit of a concern (at Southern LNG on Elba) when their operators discovered it, so they suspended the arrival of the LNG tanker due to come in Saturday until they were sure everything had been checked out," said Charlie Johnson, a port security specialist for the Coast Guard's Marine Safety Office Savannah.

Fred Beason of Bottom Line Echo, reportedly was called in to do sonar scans of the slip and surrounding area, while the 950-foot-long, orange-domed Arctic Discoverer sat offshore of Tybee Island, waiting for the all clear.

Beason, reached Monday, would not comment.

"They really went above and beyond," Johnson said. "This didn't even rise to the level of a reportable incident."

In fact, neither the Coast Guard nor Southern LNG's marine security chief was aware of the sailboat's presence at the dock until it was gone, Johnson said.

"There were no violations - the waterway surrounding Elba is not a restricted zone - and no breach of security," he added.

Bill Baerg, a spokesman for El Paso, the parent company of Southern LNG, said terminal operators were aware of the sailboat "from the time it entered the slip."

The sailboat did not violate any laws in dropping anchor where it did, because no LNG ship was in the slip at the time, Baerg said.

He dismissed the incident.

"From our perspective it was not anything that was a major event," Baerg said.

But it was a big enough event to prompt a Monday-morning conversation about looking into the possibility of creating a permanent restricted zone around Elba, Johnson said.

The incident also dismayed some LNG-watchers, among them James Fay, professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fay has made a career of studying the risks of LNG.

"There's legitimate reason to question whether the security of the facility is sufficient to prevent terrorist attacks on the tanks from the sea side," he said.

"That shows a serious breach in security measures," Watson said. "Not just for (El Paso), but the Coast Guard and anybody who's monitoring the river."

A critical question is whether a sailboat filled with explosives anchored at the slip would be close enough to the site's LNG storage tanks to damage them, Fay said. That seems unlikely to him.

Another terrorist scenario, however, allows for the movement of people off a boat to carry dynamite or another explosive closer to the four tanks.

"They don't seem to have any way to prevent that," Fay said.

The same weakness troubles Watson.

"How easy is it to get from the docks to the tanks?" he asked. "Somebody could easily turn those tanks into bombs. A pound of C-4 (plastic explosive) on the side of one of those tanks and you've got a catastrophe."

Plans to expand meet national concerns

Hazards researcher Chuck Watson, of Savannah-based Kinetic Analysis Corp., used previously published LNG risk analyses to estimate the area that would be affected by an accident or terrorist attack on the terminal at Elba Island on the Savannah River.

Each ring depicted above encloses the area where exposed skin would experience second degree burns in the event of a spill and subsequent fire, according to each scenario.

Southern LNG recently doubled Elba's storage capacity with a new tank, and it plans to double capacity again with an additional two tanks by 2012 .

The safety of LNG, which is considered part of the nation's critical infrastructure, has been the subject of national debate. A 2004 risk analysis of LNG prepared by Sandia National Laboratories for the Department of Energy includes an estimate that a spill of 14,000 cubic meters of LNG, if ignited, could burn hot enough to blister exposed skin a mile away.

An LNG tanker such as the Arctic Discoverer, which was delayed in its delivery to Elba over the weekend, carries about ten times that much of the fuel.

Experts agree Elba is reasonably well-isolated to protect against harm to the public in many spill situations. Concerns remain for some scenarios, however.